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A serious shortage of nursing assistants in the United States combined with a growing immigrant population from east African cultures has created the perfect opportunity for Jolene Baker (B.S. ’78). The nurse and onetime immigrant to Ethiopia who is fluent in Amharic—the official Ethiopian language— has found her niche teaching in the Nursing Assistant Training Program for New Americans at the International Institute of Minnesota in St. Paul. “I see myself as a bridge between two worlds,” she says. “I know what it’s like to be an immigrant, trying to learn the language and the culture. Trying to make friends. Trying to make sense of a completely foreign place. So I can add that dimension to my teaching. I can put the two together and be the bridge between here and there.”

The 12 students in Baker’s spring-term class came to Minnesota from Somalia, India, Liberia, Cameroon, and Ethiopia. Each is a refugee, permanent resident, naturalized citizen, or has been granted asylum, and all went through rigorous testing and interviews before being accepted into the program. They have one thing in common that makes them ideal candidates to help fill the nursing assistant shortage in this country: They come from communities that are accustomed to honoring their elders.

There is an enormous shortage of nursing assistants in nursing homes and other medical facilities, so this is a job that suits our students who come from cultures where, if people make it to old age, they are revered and deserve to be cared for,” Baker says. The 20-hour-a-week training program follows the state-mandated curriculum for training nursing assistants. In addition, Baker instructs her students in the cultural values within which they will work. Some of those values are speed, convenience, cleanliness, and even how to shake hands and smile during a job interview. “We teach not only how to be a nursing assistant, but how to adjust to the American culture and how to make a contribution to that culture,” Baker says.

Baker spent 14 years in Ethiopia, beginning in 1988 when she and her husband, Jeff (B.S. ’77), went to live and work in the mountain village area of Gebre Awanno with Serving in Mission, a Christian missionary group. They chose Ethiopia because the needs of the country matched the combination of Jeff’s skills as a carpenter and Jolene’s skills as a nurse, and because it was far away from the comfort of their home in Minneapolis. “We lived in a shipping container that Jeff converted into a house by cutting windows and doors into it and building a roof over a screen porch,” Baker says. “We had a solar panel to run one little radio, we had no electricity or running water, and the outhouse was about a block away.”

Jeff helped build housing and a hospital while Jolene home-schooled their two young daughters and practiced what she described as “ad hoc nursing.” The people in the village would seek her out whenever they needed routine medical care or emergency attention, including, once, a group of five men who had been attacked by a leopard. “These people were in desperate need of basic health care, clean water—all the essentials,” she says. “So the work we were doing was very satisfying.”

After three years in the village, the Bakers relocated to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, where Jeff worked as a teacher, administrator, and builder, and Jolene developed counseling and support systems as a project coordinator for an HIV/AIDS prevention program.

In 2002, when the Baker’s daughters were close to finishing high school, they decided to return to Minnesota. Back in their homeland after living more than a decade in another culture, they experienced what has come to be called the hidden immigrant phenomenon: Externally they appeared to be like other Americans, but internally they had as different a worldview and life experiences as any true immigrant would have. But in time Jolene answered a two-line newspaper ad for a clinical instructor at the institute and discovered that she could put her nursing skills and her immigrant experiences to good use by teaching others who had to adjust to life in a new country.

The institute, which is located across from the State Fairgrounds on Como Avenue in St. Paul, is the key sponsor of the annual Festival of Nations. A cross-cultural, non-sectarian social service agency founded in 1919 and affiliated with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and the United Way, one of its functions is to provide academic assistance to immigrants who are transitioning into the American culture and are interested in medical careers. The Nursing Assistant Training Program was started in 1990 and has more than 1,000 alumni—all of them immigrants. Most graduates go right to work in a nursing or assisted living facility; many continue their education in the nursing/medical field. “Our success rate for certification is the highest of all nursing assistant programs in the state, and our students stay longer in their jobs than those who get their training elsewhere,” Baker says. “I think this is because they bring their cultural values of honoring and caring for the elderly to the program, and we bridge the cultural gap by beautifully imbedding these values into what we teach.”

—Evelyn Cottle Raedler